Former SS guard on trial for 5,230 murders at concentration camp

A 93-year-old Nazi concentration camp guard has gone on trial in Germany accused of 5,230 counts of accessory to murder.

Bruno Dey was pushed into the courtroom in Hamburg in a wheelchair, accompanied by one of his daughters.

While there is no evidence of Dey’s direct involvement in a killing in Stutthof, prosecutors argue that as a camp guard from August 1944 to April 1945 he aided in all the killings that took place during that period.

Dey, a baker by training, does not deny being a guard at Stutthof.

He gave wide-ranging statements to investigators about his service, saying that he was deemed unfit for combat in the regular army in 1944 at the age of 17, so was drafted in to an SS guard detachment and sent to Stutthof.

His lawyer Stefan Waterkamp questioned why his client was being prosecuted now, saying that before a recent change in German legal reasoning: “nobody was interested in the simple guards”.

In recent years, prosecutors have successfully convicted former death camp guards using the argument that by helping to operate camps they were accessories to murder.

The 2015 conviction of former Auschwitz guard Oskar Groening on such reasoning was upheld by a German federal court.

In Dey’s case, the reasoning is being applied to a concentration camp rather than a death camp.

Efraim Zuroff, head Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, rejected Mr Waterkamp’s suggestion that Dey should not be prosecuted because higher-ranking Nazis were never brought to trial.

“Just because more senior criminals got away with a crime doesn’t mean that the more minor criminals are not guilty,” he said.

About three dozen survivors and their relatives have joined the trial as co-plaintiffs, as allowed under German law, including New York filmmaker Ben Cohen, whose grandmother survived Stutthof but whose great-grandmother died in the camp’s gas chamber during the time Dey served as a camp guard.